Investigation on the relationship between musical and numerical processing in Williams Syndrome

Abstract

Research Question/Problem

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by a distinctive cognitive profile, including relatively preserved social, musical, verbal, and face recognition abilities alongside impairments in visuospatial and numerical processing (Mervis et al., 2000). Regarding numerical skills, studies show that children and adults with WS have deficits in the representation of magnitudes, presenting difficulties in counting and number comparison tasks (Ansari et al., 2007; Paterson et al., 2006). On the other hand, studies have reported that individuals with WS exhibit heightened musical engagement and interest, and in some cases performance comparable to controls in musical perception tasks (Levitin, 2005; Levitin & Bellugi, 1998; Levitin et al., 2004). This profile has often been interpreted as evidence of a dissociation between musical and numerical cognition in WS.

Objectives

The present analytical group comparison study aimed to investigate the relationship between musical perception and nonsymbolic numerical magnitude processing in children and adolescents with Williams Syndrome.

Method

Thirty participants were evaluated and divided into three groups (n=10 per group): a group of individuals with WS, a typically developing chronological age–matched control group (CA), and a younger typically developing group (YD). Participants completed a nonsymbolic magnitude comparison task and musical perception assessment using the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia and the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Musical Abilities.

Results

No significant differences were found between the WS group and the YD control group across musical domains (p> .05 for all). In contrast, the CA control group performed significantly better than the WS group across all musical domains (p<0.01). Similarly, results revealed no significant difference was observed between the WS group and the YD group (t(14) = 1.86, p = .085, d=0.93), and a significant difference between the WS and CA groups (t(14) = 5.15, p < .001, d=2.57), indicating lower discrimination acuity in the WS group. Across all participants, performance on musical perception tasks was strongly associated with numerical acuity, as indexed by the Weber fraction (r = −0.81, p < .001).

Conclusions

The results indicated that individuals with WS performed similarly to younger typically developing participants across musical and numerical tasks, but showed marked differences when compared to age-matched controls. These findings suggest that the performance of individuals with WS in tasks assessing musical perception and nonsymbolic number processing resembles that of typically developing children at earlier developmental stages, rather than that of age-matched peers. Considering all participants, a strong negative correlation was observed between the Weber fraction values and the total score in musical tasks, indicating that lower thresholds for nonsymbolic numerical magnitude discrimination were associated with better musical performance. This finding supports the existence of an association between numerical magnitude processing and musical perception across development. Although musical abilities are frequently described as relatively preserved in WS, the present findings suggest that this preservation is not primarily driven by enhanced analytical discrimination of musical features.